The Royal Handmaid

by Gilbert, Morris

  The two stood and watched, and Rena felt better. If there were animals, there was food.

  “We’d better keep moving,” Travis said, “but those goats make me feel better. You know, we could capture a male and a female and raise our own herd.”

  “That’s what Robinson Crusoe did. He had milk and cheese too.”

  “Say, that’s right.”

  After watching the goats for a few minutes, Travis decided they’d better get back to the others.

  “You don’t have to turn back on my account,” Rena said.

  “I’m already hungry, and we’ll be plenty more hungry by the time we get back. That turtle soup sounds better all the time.”

  “All right. I’m getting thirsty again too.”

  The two turned and hiked back in the same general direction they had come. Rena was troubled that they had seen no sign whatsoever of human life. No smoke from a village, no well-traveled paths, no other sign.

  As if reading her mind, Travis said, “There could still be people here.”

  “We don’t know how big this island is, Travis. It might be twenty miles or more to the other side. If there are people over there, it could take us a while to find them.”

  “We’ll never know unless we try.”

  The two scrambled back down the hill, and when the trees began to grow thicker, he said, “Look. There’s that big tree where the spring is.”

  “I could use a drink of that water.”

  “It’s odd how little things become so important in a situation like this,” Travis remarked as they moved quickly toward the big tree.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean like fresh water. We always took it for granted at home, and now I’m looking forward to a cool drink like my life depends on it and thanking God that there’s a spring here! Maybe many of them. We’ve got a lot to be thankful for, haven’t we?”

  “Yes,” Rena said reluctantly, “but I’d be more thankful to see a ship anchored off shore when we get back.”

  “I doubt that will happen, Rena, but it would be a good thing to pray for.”

  Rena sighed disconsolately and shook her head. It was true she had been glad to find fresh water and goats, which meant a prolonged existence on the island would be possible. But how long could she endure that kind of existence? Who would want to live like Robinson Crusoe for the rest of their lives? She said nothing as the two hurried now, both anxious to reach the spring for a refreshing drink.

  ****

  Maggie was sitting on the beach looking out at the wreck of the Mary Anne. It swayed slightly each time the waves broke against it, but it had not completely broken apart. She wondered if the men could go back and get more things. She had slept poorly all night and felt dirty and gritty. Hearing a voice, she turned and saw that Shep was coming along the beach carrying something slung over his back. Getting to her feet, she felt a moment’s gladness. Shep always made her feel better. “What have you got, Shep?”

  “Coconuts. How ’bout some nice fresh coconut milk?”

  “Oooh, that sounds good!” Maggie watched as Shep undid the rope net. “Where’d you get the net?”

  Looking at her with surprise, Shep grinned, “I made it, of course.”

  “All those little knots? I couldn’t do that.”

  “You’re not a sailor like I am. Sailors do know how to tie knots. Here, I’ll get you a drink.” He pulled a huge knife from his back pocket and used it to hack away at the coconut until he had worn away a jagged hole. “Try this.”

  Maggie raised the coconut and took several swallows of the liquid on the inside. “My, that’s good!”

  “Well, we won’t starve, anyway. We may just have to live on coconut pie and coconut soup for the rest of our lives.”

  “Did you find any sign of life that way along the beach?”

  Shep was hacking away at another coconut. “Not a thing,” he said. “Captain didn’t say it, but I don’t think he expects to find anything. Not people anyway.”

  Shep’s word disappointed Maggie. She lifted the coconut again and drained the last of the fluid. “I’m frightened, Shep.”

  Surprise flared in the sailor’s eyes. “Well, there’s nothin’ to be afraid of. I don’t think there’s any wild animals here, and we’re not gonna starve.”

  “But to think of staying here forever . . .”

  “Well, maybe a ship will come along sooner or later.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Sure. Why not?” He took a drink of coconut milk himself. “What have you been doing all morning?”

  “Nothing really.”

  “I’ve got a job you can help me with.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I don’t really like sleeping on the ground. Too many land crabs.”

  Maggie shivered. “They give me the creeps,” she said. “But what can we do about it?”

  “We can make cots to get ourselves off the ground. We get one of the axes and go out and cut some saplings. We’ve got enough heavy cord and rope to make a framework, and then we’ll take a canvas and sew it together and stuff it with leaves or moss or whatever we can find for a mattress.”

  “Oh, that sounds wonderful! I’ll help, but you’ll have to show me how.”

  “No problem.”

  Maggie felt better as Shep walked beside her, the load of coconuts slung over his shoulder. She looked down and a troubling thought came to her. “I wish I weren’t—”

  Maggie broke off suddenly, and Shep looked at her. “You wish you weren’t what?”

  “I wish I weren’t so fat.”

  He laughed. “You don’t have to worry about that now. You won’t be fat for long!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this kind of living will wear us all down. In a few weeks you’ll be wishing you had some of those pounds back again.”

  “Never! I’ve always hated being fat, yet I never manage to stop eating so much.”

  “Well, just trust Dr. Shep Riggs on this one. I guarantee you in two weeks you’ll have to take that dress in because you’ll be lost in it.”

  Maggie laughed too. “I’ve tried all my life to lose weight and never could. If I could just be like other women, I wouldn’t care if I was on a desert island.”

  Shep hoisted the coconuts off his back and put the bundle by the other supplies. He turned to face Maggie. “Why, you’re a fine-looking lady, and like I say, before long you won’t have to worry about extra pounds. You’ll be able to eat all you want.”

  “All the coconuts anyway. Shep, you make me feel better.”

  Shep was embarrassed. He had been intimidated by this group of highly educated missionaries, but he saw now that this woman was just a person after all. She was frightened, just like most of the others were. Shep was a simple enough man that he thought mostly of survival for one day at a time. He had lived that way his whole life, and now it gave him pleasure to realize that he would be able to help this woman who was so much above him in other ways. “C’mon. We’ll make your cot first. You’ll sleep like a baby tonight.”

  ****

  As Rena and Travis arrived back at camp, Dalton met them, his mouth drawn tight in an expression she had learned to recognize. “Where have you been, Rena?”

  “Travis and I wanted to see what was inland.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone,” Dalton said angrily. “It’s dangerous.”

  Travis was watching Dalton carefully. “Nothing more dangerous than getting tired, but we did find a spring of fresh water and some wild goats. So that’s good news.”

  Dalton did not relax, however, and as soon as Travis was out of earshot, he said to Rena, “That wasn’t thoughtful of you.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Going off like that without telling anyone.”

  Rena looked up quickly. “You mean without telling you. What’s wrong, Dalton? You’re not really angry, are you?”

  “I was worried. Don’t do that again.�
��

  Suddenly Rena grinned. “Why, Dalton Welborne, I believe you are jealous.”

  “Of Travis? Don’t be ridiculous! I know you’d never have anything to do with a roughneck like that.”

  The words struck Rena as being wrong, although she herself had had exactly the same thought. Not wanting to quarrel with Dalton, however, she quickly apologized. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to trouble you. But it is good news about the water and the goats, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” he conceded.

  “Did you find anything farther down the beach?”

  “Not a thing. We ran into a promontory that we couldn’t walk around. The plan now is to row around it in the cutter, but we’re all pretty well agreed that it’s a small island.”

  The two made their way over to the cooking tent, where an enormous pot of turtle soup was waiting for them. Oscar said, “If I had some herbs, it would taste better, but I done the best I could. Here, somebody help me dish it out.”

  “I’ll do that,” Meredith offered. She took the ladle and filled the bowls as the others gathered around. “We’re lucky to have bowls and spoons and knives,” she said. “Who’ll ask the blessing?”

  “You do it, Meredith,” the professor said.

  She bowed her head, and the others followed suit. Even the crew did the same. “Lord, we thank you for this food and for this provision. We recognize that as a maiden looks to the hand of her mistress, so we look to your hand for everything we have. Never before have we realized, Lord, how dependent we are on you. So we thank you for this meal and ask you to provide others. We ask this in the name of Jesus.”

  Amens went around from the missionaries, and they all found some place to sit.

  “This is really delicious!” Meredith said. “It couldn’t be any better.”

  “That’s right,” Benson agreed with a nod. He took another spoonful of the soup and blew on it before sipping it. “As long as the turtles hold out, we’ll eat well.”

  “Maybe some of you didn’t hear,” Rena said, “but Travis and I found some wild goats.”

  “I love roast goat,” Shep said. “How far away were they?”

  “About five or six miles, I’d guess. There’s a good spring too.”

  “We found some breadfruit trees down along the shore,” Shep said, stripping off his shirt. The wind ruffled his black hair, and his warm brown eyes sparkled as he smiled cheerfully. “When you roast it, it tastes a lot like bread.”

  A murmur went around, and the conversation turned to different kinds of food. Finally Captain Barkley said, “We’ve got to go slowly on the food supplies we brought from off the ship. We need to live off the land as much as possible. That means we’ll have to hunt and fish, and Chip here can help us identify the edible plants.”

  “We found some delicious berries,” Rena said. A pixyish notion came to her. “Travis found a way to decide whether or not they were poisonous.”

  “How was that?” Dalton asked.

  “He told me to eat one, and if I dropped over dead, he’d know.”

  Dalton’s jaw tightened. “That wasn’t very funny, Travis.”

  “Oh, he was only teasing, and he ate the first ones,” Rena assured him.

  Travis saw that Dalton was staring at him with disdain. He had never crossed the tall man, but he knew that Dalton felt superior to him.

  “Is there any hope of building a ship, Captain?” Lanie asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he responded. “A raft maybe, but we couldn’t all go. We’d have to just send one person with supplies and hope they hit land and could send back help. It would be a dangerous undertaking.”

  “Then we’ll just have to wait for a ship.” Lanie shrugged.

  The captain began to outline the work that needed to be done, and after the meal he assigned most of the crew to cutting firewood for signal fires. He agreed with Travis’s idea about having three, and they talked about keeping the wood as dry as possible to start the fires with.

  The work parties broke up, and Charlie Day moved out with Lars Olsen. “We ain’t never gonna get off this island!” he growled.

  “We might someday,” Lars said. “Ships go everywhere. You know that, Charlie.”

  “Yeah, but chances are a thousand to one! This is a little bitty speck.”

  “Well, we gotta mind the captain, so let’s get started on that firewood.”

  Charlie turned and faced Lars. “Who says we gotta mind the captain? We ain’t on no ship now.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean the captain ain’t got no authority over us here. It was only on the ship.”

  “But he’s the captain,” Lars said. “We gotta do what he says.”

  Day stared at the tall, angular Swede and shook his head. “No we don’t. If we stick together, we can do what we please.”

  Olsen dismissed the idea at once. He shouldered the ax and repeated, “He’s the captain. C’mon, let’s go cut wood.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “You Must Help Her!”

  As Travis moved up toward higher ground, he glanced back and could see the bare summits of the ridges through which he, Pete, and Shep had come. He could even see the faint smudge that marked the three signal fires at the camp far behind him. This was virgin forest, and the silver foliage of a clump of trees he could not identify contrasted with the dark green of the bush. They had passed the coconut palms, which grew near the sea, and now the foliage of the trees was a variegated green, restful to the eye.

  “Mighty pretty weather.” Shep turned and waited until the two larger men caught up with him. The wiry man was much faster on his feet than either Travis or Pete, and now his eyes danced as he waited for the two. “You fellows better hurry up,” he said. “You’re mighty slow.”

  “I never thought a runt like you could outclimb me,” Pete said. His blond hair was ruffled by the breeze, and his blue eyes matched the sky above as he grinned at the smaller man. “I think you must be part mountain goat.”

  Pete and Shep had become good friends, though they were rather strangely matched. At six-three, Pete towered over Shep, yet he felt inferior to the smaller man. Travis, following behind them, listened to their conversation, pleased that they had found some common ground on which to form a friendship. I wish everyone got along as well as those two.

  They had been on the island for eight days now, enough time for Travis to identify the group’s weaknesses. Although they had worked furiously to create a world for themselves, it was obvious to Travis that trouble lay ahead if they were not rescued soon. He said nothing about it to anyone else, however.

  “Where were these here goats you’ve been telling us about, Travis?” Shep asked. He searched the wilderness ahead, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand.

  “Not too far away.”

  “How do you propose to catch ’em?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. We could shoot ’em, of course, but I’d rather capture several females and a male, and then we can breed ’em.”

  “That wouldn’t be bad,” Pete murmured. “Then we could have milk and cheese anytime we wanted—not to mention the occasional roast goat sandwich! But I imagine they’re pretty wild.”

  “I hope we can rope ’em, but I’m not much of a cowboy.”

  “I am,” Pete piped up. “I grew up on a ranch in Montana.”

  “Is that what you brought that rope for?”

  “Yup. Out here, you’d better make yourself useful.”

  As the three men forged steadily upward into the clean, pure air and the bright sunlight, they finally crested a ridge and then started down. They kept a hard pace until the land began to level off. “See that valley over there?” Travis asked. “That’s where Rena and I saw them.”

  “I see ’em now,” Shep announced.

  “Can you see that far?” Pete asked enviously. “How many are there?”

  “About twenty it looks like,” Shep said, “but I don’t see how anybody could r
ope ’em. You can’t run as fast as a goat, can you, Pete?”

  “I think there’s a better way than that,” Travis said. “Shep, you and I are going to split here. We’ll get around on the flanks of those goats and try to run ’em through that gap. See it, Pete, right over there? It’s like a little door to that valley.”

  “Yeah, I see it. So I drop a rope over one of them when they come through.”

  “If they come through,” Shep said dubiously. “Some of them goats have got a pretty good set of horns. A poor sailor like me don’t need to be beat up by a goat.”

  “Shep, you go that way, and I’ll take the right here. Pete, you get down to that gap.”

  “Right.”

  Pete watched the two as they divided and disappeared to his right and to his left into the underbrush. He made his way forward, fingering the rope, and when he reached the gap that Travis had pointed out, he stationed himself behind an outcropping of rock covered with moss. There was nothing else he could do. He could not see the animals through the gap, so he waited for what seemed like a long time.

  “There they come, I think,” he muttered as the miniature thunder of the hooves came closer. He made his loop and held it loosely in his right hand with the rest of the rope in his left. He risked a quick look around to see the animals as they were herded toward the gap.

  “Shouldn’t be too hard.” He put his arm back and started swinging the rope when three of the animals burst through. He dropped the rope over the head of the leader, a big male, and threw his weight backward. “Gotcha!” he yelled as the animal cartwheeled over when he came to the end of the rope. Pete ran forward as the animal was getting up and starting to run away. Pete threw himself forward and wrestled the animal to the ground. Pete ignored the other goats passing by and quickly pulled out his pocketknife, sliced off the free end of the rope, and tied three of the goat’s legs together just above the hoof. He heard Travis yelling, and grabbing up the rope, he formed his loop again.

  A large white nanny was charging along, followed by a kid. She tried to dodge, but expertly Pete dropped the rope over her neck, and when he hauled her to a stop, the kid ran by but stopped a short distance ahead.

  “Come on back, baby goat,” Pete said. The nanny was bucking and trying to get away, but Pete overhanded the line until he brought her up. She tried to butt at him, but he put his free hand on her forehead, holding the rope with his left.